Best 5 Horror Movies in Netflix

1. The Exorcist
Year: 1973
Director: William Friedkin
Stars: Linda Blair, Ellen Burstyn, Max von Sydow, Jason Miller, Lee J. Cobb
Rating: R
Runtime: 122 minutes

The Exorcist is a bit of a safe pick, but then you wrestle with whether any other film on this list is
more disturbing, more influential or just plain scarier than this movie, and there simply isn’t one.
The film radiates an aura of dread—it feels somehow unclean and tilted, even before all of the
possession scenes begin. Segments like the “demon face” flash on the screen for an eighth of a
second, disorienting the viewer and giving you a sense that you can never, ever let your guard
down. It worms its way under your skin and then stays there forever. The film constantly wears
down any sense of hope that both the audience and the characters might have, making you feel
as if there’s no way that this priest (Jason Miller), not particularly strong in his own faith, is going
to be able to save the possessed little girl (Linda Blair). Even his eventual “victory” is a very
hollow thing, as later explored by author William Peter Blatty in The Exorcist III. Watching it is an
ordeal, even after having seen it multiple times before. The Exorcist is a great film by any
definition.

2. The Haunting of Hill House

Year: 2018
Director: Mike Flanagan
Stars: Henry Thomas, Michiel Huisman, Carla Gugino, Elizabeth Reaser, Oliver Jackson-Cohen,
Kate Siegel, Victoria Pedretti
Runtime: 10 episodes

The aesthetic of The Haunting of Hill House makes it work not only as horror TV, but also as a
deft adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s classic novel. The monsters, ghosts, and things that go
bump on the wall are off-screen, barely shown, or obscured by shadow. The series even goes
back to some of the first film adaptation’s decisions, in terms of camera movement and shot
design, in order to develop uneasiness and inconsistency. Well, maybe “inconsistency” is the
wrong word. The only thing that feels truly inconsistent while watching it is your mind: You’re
constantly wary of being tricked, but the construction of its scenes often gets you anyway. By
embracing the squirm—and the time necessary to get us to squirm rather than jump—The
Haunting of Hill House is great at creating troubling scenarios, and even better about letting us
marinate in them.

3. It Follows
Year: 2015
Director: David Robert Mitchell
Stars: Maika Monroe, Keir Gilchrist, Daniel Zovatto, Jake Weary, Olivia Luccardi, Lili Sepe
Rating: R
Runtime: 100 minutes

The specter of Old Detroit haunts It Follows. In a dilapidating ice cream stand on 12 Mile, in the
’60s-style ranch homes of Ferndale or Berkley, in a game of Parcheesi played by pale teenagers
with nasally, nothing accents—if you’ve never been, you’d never recognize the stale, gray
nostalgia creeping into every corner of David Robert Mitchell’s terrifying film. But it’s there, and it
feels like SE Michigan. The music, the muted but strangely sumptuous color palette, the
incessant anachronism: In style alone, Mitchell is an auteur seemingly emerged fully formed
from the unhealthy womb of Metro Detroit. Cycles and circles concentrically fill out It Follows,
from the particularly insular rules of the film’s horror plot, to the youthful, fleshy roundness of the
faces and bodies of this small group of main characters, never letting the audience forget that,
in so many ways, these people are still children. In other words, Mitchell is clear about his story:
This has happened before, and it will happen again. All of which wouldn’t work were Mitchell
less concerned with creating a genuinely unnerving film, but every aesthetic flourish, every fully
circular pan is in thrall to breathing morbid life into a single image: someone, anyone slowly
separating from the background, from one’s nightmares, and walking toward you, as if Death
itself were to appear unannounced next to you in public, ready to steal your breath with little to
no aplomb. Initially, Mitchell’s whole conceit—passing on a haunting through
intercourse—seems to bury conservative sexual politics under typical horror movie tropes,
proclaiming to be a progressive genre pic when it functionally does nothing to further our ideas
of slasher fare. You fornicate, you find punishment for your flagrant, loveless sinning, right? (The
film has more in common with a Judd Apatow joint than you’d expect.) Instead, Mitchell never
once judges his characters for doing what practically every teenager wants to do; he simply lays
bare, through a complex allegory, the realities of teenage sex. There is no principled implication
behind Mitchell’s intent; the cold conclusion of sexual intercourse is that, in some manner, you
are sharing a certain degree of your physicality with everyone with whom your partner has
shared the same. That he accompanies this admission with genuine respect and empathy for
the kinds of characters who, in any other horror movie, would be little more than visceral fodder
for a sadistic spirit, elevates It Follows from the realm of disguised moral play into a sickly scary
coming-of-age tale. Likewise, Mitchell inherently understands that there is practically nothing
more eerie than the slightly off-kilter ordinary, trusting the film’s true horror to the tricks our
minds play when we forget to check our periphery. It Follows is a film that thrives in the borders,
not so much about the horror that leaps out in front of you, but the deeper anxiety that waits at
the verge of consciousness—until, one day soon, it’s there, reminding you that your time is
limited, and that you will never be safe. Forget the risks of teenage sex, It Follows is a
penetrating metaphor for growing up.

4. The Conjuring

Year: 2013
Director: James Wan
Stars: Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, Ron Livingston, Lili Taylor
Rating: R
Runtime: 112 minutes

fair estimation, an above average director of horror films at the very least. The progenitor of big
money series such as Saw and Insidious has a knack for crafting populist horror that still carries
a streak of his own artistic identity, a Spielbergian gift for what speaks to the multiplex audience
without entirely sacrificing characterization. Several of his films sit just outside the top 100, if this
list were ever to be expanded, but The Conjuring can’t be denied as the Wan representative
because it is far and away the scariest of all his feature films. Reminding me of the experience
of first seeing Paranormal Activity in a crowded multiplex, The Conjuring has a way of
subverting when and where you expect the scares to arrive. Its haunted house/possession story
is nothing you haven’t seen before, but few films in this oeuvre in recent years have had half the
stylishness that Wan imparts on an old, creaking farmstead in Rhode Island. The film toys with
audience’s expectations by throwing big scares at you without standard Hollywood Jump Scare
build-ups, simultaneously evoking classic golden age ghost stories such as Robert Wise’s The
Haunting. Its intensity, effects work and unrelenting nature set it several tiers above the PG-13
horror against which it was primarily competing. It’s interesting to note that The Conjuring
actually did receive an “R” rating despite a lack of overt “violence,” gore or sexuality. It was
simply too frightening to deny, and that is worthy of respect.

5. Fear Street Part Three: 1666

Year: 2021
Director: Leigh Janiak
Stars: Kiana Madeira, Ashley Zukerman, Gillian Jacobs, Olivia Scott Welch, Benjamin Flores Jr.,
Darrell Britt-Gibson
Rating: R
Runtime: 114 minutes

The first two entries in Netflix’s Fear Street trilogy from director Leigh Janiak have been widely
described (and widely praised) within the bounds of language often devoted to slasher
movies—as solid “popcorn entertainment” and “simple fun” that represents, in this case, a
welcome divergence from the more serious streak of arthouse horror we’ve been experiencing
of late. And although it is true that there’s nothing “elevated” or pretentious about any of these
three Fear Street entries, to simply think of them as slasher films isn’t quite right either, despite
their gory flair. They’re not even really meta-slashers in the mold of Scream, which was
relentlessly name-checked by critics as they appraised first entry Fear Street: 1994 in particular.
Rather, the real meat of this trilogy is a metaphysical, supernatural mystery that spans across
lifetimes and centuries—it’s a story that uses the trappings of slasher cinema in two different
eras, the ‘90s and ‘70s, in order to get at eventual themes of scapegoating, privilege and
corrupted history. This is the bigger message that final entry Fear Street Part Three: 1666
attempts to deliver, albeit in a clumsier manner than its previous time jump, in a more difficult
setting to truly capture. Three movies in, the little absurdities of this series are beginning to
mount, but it at least manages to remain briskly entertaining and pretty damn bloody.